Fine wine and I

Fine wine and I don't travel very well. I like my own bed; I have my little routines. I have certain needs—broadband, my preferred brand of peanut butter, a gas stove, The Comedy Channel. So I just make do on the road, and try to suck it up. And I try to bring my new environment into line with my inclinations. For example, my brother lives in dial-up land. You've been there--everything is very slow, the cars are large and the hair funny. You can't carry the phones around, and the rabbit ears bring in fuzzy reruns of Green Acres and soap operas that haven't fully resolved any plot line since the 1970s.

After trying to connect to the world through AOL on a 10-year-old computer, I try to pirate his neighbor's wireless on my laptop, but they are an untrusting lot in the city. So I go to the local library branch to scavenge a slow and spotty connection from the fire hall down the road. I replace the antique phones with portables and convince my bro' to invest in DSL--which will be turned on a week after I leave--sigh. I connect up his digital conversion boxes, but his antenna lives in the basement, and brings in little to titillate my viewing pleasure.

But all is not lost—the twenty-first century can still be found at the mall. Free wifi, good coffee, fresh pastries, and a battery-saving plug-in in my own booth. Now this is more like it. Sure it's a wasteland of parking lots outside and it has a carbon footprint the size of Connecticut, but I'm plugged in, back in business until the lunch crowd eats all the scones and bandwidth.

No Comments

Given the overall popularity of sites like FaceBook and MySpace, and the tools of online social networking in general--blogs, comment threads, social bookmarking, video, music and photo sharing platforms, citizen journalism, and on and on--it surprises me how little direct interaction there is between ncpr.org and its visitors. The two bright spots are our Photo of the Day feature, which has attracted since its inception more quality submissions than we can ever use, and the Community Calendar, where a substantial number of each day's events are contributed by visitors online.

Our general listener comment page has, on the other hand, attracted three comments in June, and one each in the months of July, August, and September. Brian Mann, in his new blog Ballot Box, has posted thoughtful and timely essays on North Country politics and the rural divide 19 times in the last ten days. He has received three comments total from the hundreds who have read the posts. Actually he has received five, including two abusive comments from the same writer trying to look like one person responding to another. Those didn't get posted. If the rude and nasty tenor of many political sites is keeping you away, we moderate comments--each is read before posting and will be rejected if it transgresses the bounds of civil public conversation.

We plan to go ahead with such features as the ability to comment on individual NCPR news stories, and to participate on NPR's soon-to-be-released social media platform. But it may be that our audience still does its networking the old-fashioned way: talking in the supermarket aisle and the ice cream stand queue and the at the pancake breakfast. Or perhaps it's just our laconic nature as rural folk. If you have anything to say about that, you can post a comment here.

"Friend me" not

While I have been fascinated to follow the development of social networks on the web, I have never warmed up to them in practice. The very name sounds oxymoronic--social sounds, well--sociable--and network sounds like work. So I might visit a FaceBook page for information, but I have not built one of my own, and rarely interact with the pages of others. My cell phone is not web connected and sits mostly idle--a text message has never passed its tiny little keypad. For a while I tracked old running buddies via Classmates, but with both ends needing to be paying customers to actually communicate, my skinflint genes kicked in and I let it lapse. The alternate reality site Second Life now moves on without me. I tried to create an avatar there that looked like me, but everything came out way more young and buff than sad reality, and I had no desire to present myself as a blue punk vampire with a face full of steel, or to build a zero-gravity domicile constructed entirely of virtual cornflakes.

So my social life operates in a way a cave man would recognize. I go to where people live and sit within earshot of quiet conversation. I share food, news, blarney and opinion in kitchens and coffeeshops. I like my music live and will pay for the privilege. I embrace my inner throwback. There is no end to the axes I enjoy the grinding of, and I guess social networking is one. Don't friend me, I'll friend you.

Dread air

It was 4:25 am when my phone rang and the voice of Radio Bob delivered the prerecorded message “Gee! It’s awfully quiet here at North Country Public Radio.”--the silence detector on the transmitter telling me that my hasty training as cub radio tech acolyte was about to be put to the test. My first reaction was “Good grief, don’t you realize you’ve reached an English major?” But I was soon engaged in remote viewing of the dimly-understood station automation system via my laptop at home. No joy. So I put on my coffee and drank some clothes and by 5 am was at the station, clueless, but proud to serve. First I woke Joel Hurd from his well-deserved rest to interrogate the transmitter, then I woke Radio Bob in mid-getaway at a downstate hotel room. Yelling “Help” real loud is within my skill set.

Soon Bob was talking to Joel in the studio on one cell phone, and to me—exiled to our Waterman Hill transmitter shack to read dials—on another cell phone. This made it hard for him to use his hand puppets. While Joel may be an engineer, he's a production engineer, and compared to a radio engineer, that’s about as relevant as being a choo-choo engineer. As for me, the web manager—that may sound techy, but web geeks think radio technology is made up of tyuubes and—things. Actually, with the online stream still working, I was thinking “Ha—so much for the legacy platform, it’s time for the true masters of cyberspace to rule. MWAA-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

Some hours later Bob had distilled enough information from the mash of our ignorance to make a diagnosis, and Ellen Rocco and Sandy Demarest dispatched themselves south on a high-tech treasure hunt. They brought back a brand new stochastic deverbillator (or something like that) and a mere eleven hours after the dreaded call, we were back on the air. For those who take an interest in the technical specs; it was a metal box, sort of rectangular in shape. I think it may have contained both tyuubes—and things.